The Bureau of Indian Affairs will seek permission to reconnect its schools to the public Internet, a top official said on Sunday.

Ed Parisian, director of BIA's Office of Indian Education Programs, said the agency is asking a federal judge to reconsider his decision to shut down the Internet connection. Last week, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction
that forced the schools and other Department of Interior computer systems offline.

"It's got a lot of implications in a lot of places," Parisian said yesterday at the 8th annual National Indian Education Association legislative summit in Washington, D.C.

Indian Country schools were previously shielded from two prior shutdown orders because their computer systems reside on a network separate from the BIA. EDNET, as the school network is known, had been connected to the Internet while the rest of BIA remains offline.

But in response to a breakdown in the relationship between the department and his court, Lamberth broadened the scope of his latest order. Officials responded by cutting EDNET's connection to the Internet last Monday.

Previously, he added, "We were outside the computer
system that's in the BIA."

The BIA has been soliciting Indian school educators for
information on the impact of the shutdown. Parisian said government lawyers would submit the information to Lamberth this week.

Some attendees of NIEA's summit, which runs through Tuesday, were
frustrated with the latest activity but took it in stride.
The shutdown mostly affects high school and post-secondary
students, like those at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas
and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.

Lamberth's order, like his earlier ones,
outlines a process to reconnect DOI's computer systems
to the Internet but officials last week attacked it
as "a new frontier in this court's efforts to run the operations of the executive
branch agencies." For nearly a year,
the department and its lawyers have been feuding with special
master Alan Balaran over the reconnection process.

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the minority leader, on Friday expressed dismay that
the department allowed the BIA schools to go offline. In a letter, he called
on Secretary Gale Norton to "take the necessary steps to comply with the
demands of the court order so that the operations of the DoI
and its related agencies are not adversely affected by a situation that is easily fixable."

He also wrote, "These students should not be penalized for the
failure of your Department to adequately protect information about Indian trust
accounts, or for your Department's continued inability to resolve the historical
mismanagement of Indian trust accounts."

The BIA oversees 185 schools and dormitories throughout Indian Country.
Most are elementary schools and all have Internet access. The last
Internet hookup occurred in 2001 at a remote school on the
Navajo Nation.

At a tour of the BIA's new computer facility in northern Virginia
last month,
information technology officials confirmed that EDNET operates
independently of TRUSTNET, the new name for the BIA's network.
The separation ensures the BIA schools do not house, or have access to,
Indian trust data.

Both networks, however, are overseen by the same senior manager.
TRUSTNET remains offline due to concerns over security vulnerabilities.
Court-hired hackers, in the summer of 2001, were able to break into
BIA's trust computer systems without detection, and were even able
to create a false Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust account.
They gained access to title and record information
of Indian landowners and to royalty payment systems that handle millions of dollars
in transactions every year.